One man's adventure mapping Durham and beyond, not knowing what lurks round the corner.

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London Parties

Posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 by Gregory Marler.

Much appologies for the lack of recent blogging, you don’t want to know how much of a back log I have of surveyed data waiting to edit the map with. As usual I’ve been in London for the summer. This month saw OpenStreetMap’s 5th birthday, and founder Steve Coast challenged anyone to match a cake by the Japanese. I lept up at the fun of cake baking. I thought about it for days, and was finally ready to bake on the day, so I quickly bought some cakes from the supermarket to cover with ready-rolled icing and sweets. The decoration was hard enough without baking the cake, hand slicing cola bottles into beer glass pub symbols and making the strawberry laces stay still as roads.

The OSM Foundation mailing list gave a few worrying hints that there would be lots of cake competition, and at the pre-birthday AGM I heard Matt Amos(does fantasitc things, doesn’t blog enough) had a top-secret entry in the CakeMade office. Well I got to the pub first (why peopled delayed that move is beyond me) and Steve was quite shocked to see someone had actually responded to his challenge. Thankfully for his champagne bill it turned out to be just me and Matt with cakes in London, and he showed off a new gadget by video interviewing the winning cake makers.

Matt may have created the OpenStreetMap logo, but he’s now allowed the foundation to register it as a trademark and is legally required to get authorisation from the board to use it on cake or other products. Someone (okay me) wasn’t happy that Steve said I had the best cake and reported this offense to the OSMF Data Working Group (our mean guys when people use OSM without due credit). The cake in Toronto was also accused of inproper attribution of OSM contributors property. This created some serious talk on the OSMF Members mailing list, a lot more important than the last month of quite heated talk.

Andy Robinson, back on the foundation board after receiving most votes, responded first simply with “I believe the offending material is now on its way to various sewage treatment works.”. Mike Collinson, returning membership secretary used his words to comment on the “candieldy serious set of allegations” to recognise “that spatio-comestibles is very much a pioneering area and that we at OpenStreetMap are a sweet way ahead of Google and the Ordnance Survey in the UK”, also congratulating how Richard’s Tornonto cake remained online during the OSM server maintenance weekend (well if you count eaten as still available/online).

After a License Working Group meeting just to deal with these issues, the remedies are to be that: “All 151,815 names should be printed on rice-paper using a legible font. Copies should then be sent to everyone who had a slice of the [Toronto] cake… …[to consume] in the presence of a notary or other legal professional.”; “the author of these [London cupcake] geocomestibles is a member of the License Working Group [and therefore is] infallible”. As for my orginial map artwork on the cake, as it was mixed with sugar, love, and some large-corporation sweets, a creative commons CC-BY-SA distribution is not suitable, we look forward to the release of ODbL 1.0 license which will be more suitable for such a “Produced Work”. If Mike has given you more legal talk than your brain can chew, just follow Anthony Clearn’s wise words as “the only sensible way to deal with this new development is a fork”.

A week later I cycled 16 miles back into London for an evening mapping party. The pub we went to had a Quiz on so we all took part and won by just half a point, the winnings were donated to OpenStreetMap. I don’t normally wear my Surveyor High-Vis jacket sitting in pubs, but it had to be put on to spoil a celebratory photo with the cup. Harry Wood has all the pub meetup details and photos as he always does so well.

This has now encouraged me to make a sweet cake actually modelled on a location. Right now I have to pack some maps of foreign lands and enough clothes for a year, a day till I fly out to Vancouver!